Original author: Arkham
Original translation: Frank Fu, IOSG Ventures Investment Associate
TL;DR
Just yesterday, GCR, a famous big short in the cryptocurrency circle, tweeted for the first time in a year, encouraging everyone not to give up in the recent market crash. The tweet has received more than 50,000 likes. I believe many people are curious about the deeds of this legendary trader in the cryptocurrency field.
This article takes this opportunity to detail GCRs background, trading philosophy, and his past tweets about market analysis and predictions. GCR is known for his outstanding performance on the FTX exchange and his accurate predictions of market trends. GCRs preference for short selling, investment in meme coins and NFTs, and his bet on the 2024 US presidential election are all reflected in the article.
Although GCR reduced his social media activities in early 2023, his market insights and trading strategies still attract attention from the cryptocurrency community. GCRs last public speech emphasized his positive view on the future of cryptocurrency, especially the long-term optimism about the price of Ethereum. I believe that this article will help everyone regain confidence in the future development of the cryptocurrency market in the digital age and provide valuable experience and inspiration for the public.
introduce
GCR is one of the most famous traders in the Crypto space. Known by the alias “Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth” on the now defunct FTX exchange, he is well known on Twitter for his frequent and proven Crypto-related investment tips, multiple successful predictions, and smart writing.
From 2021 to 2022, he frequently appeared on FTX’s top trader rankings and beat many other market participants to become one of the top overall profit and loss figures on the exchange. Although his identity remains a mystery, he claims to have started from almost nothing and amassed his wealth simply through trading.
GCR Arkham User Profile
One of the first posts after GCR debuted on the FTX leaderboard - posted using the handle @GiganticRebirth
1. Background and History of GCR
GCR has never publicly discussed his background in depth, but occasionally mentions snippets of his life before he came to the world of Crypto. On the X platform, he mentioned that he started with a portfolio of only $1,000, saying that this was his only chance and gradually increased his assets through trading. He first demonstrated his predictive ability through political influence analysis, a practice he often mentioned on the X platform. He also dabbled in sports betting and claimed that he probably spent thousands of hours researching how to increase life expectancy.
GCR tweets about his early history
He calls himself a hard worker. When the market is good, he encourages other traders on Twitter to put in more than 120 hours a week to perfect their craft. Although he encouraged his audience to take a break at the end of 2022, he personally said that he has not taken a day off in nearly 3 and a half years.
GCRs advice to traders
GCR is essentially a contrarian - his tweets in 2021 frequently reference a Tree of Life as the key to exploiting the market. After much speculation about GCRs secrets from many different traders, he ultimately suggested that this Tree of Life was actually just a willingness to bet against the consensus view. He is a big fan of George Soros and often references Soros talking points, discussing reflexivity and the idea of contrarian thinking.
GCRs reverse thinking strategy reflects his deep understanding of market behavior and accurate grasp of group psychology. He realizes that in the market, most peoples views are often wrong, and real opportunities are often hidden in the opposite direction of consensus. This way of thinking enables him to find profit space in market fluctuations and achieve success through distinctive trading decisions.
George Soross reflexivity theory holds that the biases of market participants affect market prices, and these price changes in turn affect the expectations and behaviors of participants, forming an interactive cycle. GCR is obviously deeply influenced by this theory and applies it to its own trading strategy, looking for imbalances and opportunities in the market through reverse thinking.
Some contrarian predictions for GCR
He is best known for publicly and successfully trading Crypto in the markets of 2021 and 2022, amassing a large number of loyal fans spread across his multiple alternate accounts. However, in early 2023, he went silent, leaving after posting on Platform X that this may be my last tweet about Crypto. Since then, his social accounts have gone silent.
2. Crypto Bull Run - Early 2021
In early 2021, GCR was unknown and had only a handful of followers on Twitter, where he would post details of his recent market sentiment and trading activity. From the beginning, he favored a contrarian view, and one of his earliest posts detailed his shorting of the retail-driven GME stock price rally in January 2021. “I have always found Reddit culture offensive, and I sided with the oligarchs and the rich,” he wrote.
GCR Discussion Meme Stock Trading
His 2021 posts mainly consisted of trading principles that have since been widely circulated on Crypto Twitter, where he repeatedly emphasized the importance of patience and looking for areas where he can exert unique advantages.
GCRs advice on news trading
Interestingly, he also published one of his previous predictions, which was that if you put 20 ETH into SHIB and waited 5 months for the full bull run to peak, it might be worth 40 million. By May 2021, it turned out that traders actually only needed to invest 2 ETH in Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB) to make a profit of $40 million. This was GCRs first post, highlighting his love for memecoins (an asset class that was particularly skeptical among traditional traders in early 2021).
GCRs discussion on SHIB coin transactions
During April and May, he issued numerous bearish warnings, strongly opposing popular bullish narratives such as the “super cycle” promoted by other popular 2021 traders like 3AC’s Su Zhu. His reasons for his positions were sometimes as simple as going against the “mainstream market view” in the 2021 mass retail trader-driven boom.
GCRs tweet warns of market pullback
During the crypto craze in early 2021, the popular meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) began to surge in price. By its peak in May 2021, DOGEs price had risen by 69,136%, significantly higher than its 2020 lows. Dogecoin is a meme coin, a coin with no utility or fundamentals to back it up. It unexpectedly reached a market cap of $98 billion after tech mogul Elon Musk took an interest in it and began talking about it on Twitter. Much of its rally was driven by the liquidation of short positions held by traders who didnt believe a joke coin could have such a significant market cap.
One of GCR’s most notable trades in early 2021 was a public short on the top of DOGE on May 9, 2021, the day Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL). More than a year later, he explained: “Coins heavily invested by retailers are often hyped for months due to some ‘future catalyst’… Just as mass retail traders imagine that the meme catalyst will make them millionaires, market makers use the last waterfall of liquidity to distribute (chips).”
GCR shorted Dogecoin at the highest point
3. Upstream - Second half of 2021
In the second half of 2021, GCR turned bearish, publicly issuing recommendations to remind traders to heed his previous warnings - to reduce trading in unfavorable conditions and not to have any illusions that altcoins can survive independently and swim in the goblin town of BTC.
On July 15, GCR published his infamous 2022 bear market prediction in a private Telegram chat, predicting a long and deep bear market with little respite for even the strongest projects.
“Local bottom will be around $20k…macro/equity top in 2022…most altcoins will be down 95% or 99%.”
GCR’s Bearish Forecast
GCR’s bearish attitude does not mean that he will leave the Crypto market - quite the opposite. Despite remaining optimistic about the remaining opportunities in the market in 2021, his strategy in the second half of 2021 shifted to short positions to take advantage of market liquidity outflows. Since then, he has been heavily shorting altcoins that are weak or strong relative to BTC.
GCR discusses altcoin market on Twitter
He has also applied his forecasting skills to different assets and sectors, starting with a return to political forecasting, where he successfully bet on the rise of dark horse Valérie Pécresse during the 2022 French presidential election.
Pecresse ultimately did not win — but GCR later said his goal was to capitalize on the upside of a fringe candidate being accepted by the mainstream — as he explained, the difference between 5% and 50% is a 10x return, while betting on the winner in a to-be-decided race would only yield a 2x return.
GCR’s Political Forecast
In August, GCR began speculating on NFTs (non-fungible tokens), preferring their lower market cap to the meme coins he calls “altcoin 2.0.” In addition to attempting to buy hundreds of “Pudgy Penguins” NFTs, his address also won a “Sad Doge” NFT at an auction, which he sold a month later for $2 million in USDC (US dollar stablecoin). However, he commented that NFTs are an asset class that is very difficult to gain exposure to, saying, “My NFT investment is seven figures, but it only accounts for less than 1% of my net worth and is part of my broader barbell investment strategy.”
GCR NFT Purchase
By October 2021, he began betting on Trump to win the 2024 election. The scale of the trade was so large that getting enough liquidity on exchanges was nearly impossible, and he eventually had to resort to direct over-the-counter (OTC) transactions with Alameda Research. Just over a year later, Alameda Researchs balance sheet was leaked, showing that they still held $7.3 million worth of unhedged TRUMPLOSE tokens - likely a remnant of the GCR trade.
GCRs prediction for Trumps reelection in 2024
In October, GCR released his advice to young traders to take their time to find every possible edge in the market. Even if you live another 80 years, you will never have such easy access to generational wealth. This state of extreme prosperity lasted for about two months - until the end of November 2021, when the Crypto market reached its all-time high.
GCRs Advice for Young Traders
Soon after, he began recruiting members for a new team - named RebirthDAO. Its stated goal was to form a decentralized hedge fund by combining the forces of many extremely successful traders in the Crypto market. The teams first trade was an ETF news trade in October 2021: designed to identify and exploit the approval of the Proshares BTC futures ETF. According to GCR, the trade was very successful - RebirthDAO was one of the first public traders to receive news alerts that pushed the price of BTC from $57.1K to $59K, giving them a valuable few seconds advantage over other news traders.
GCR discussing RebirthDAO on Twitter
4. “The Big Short” - GCR in 2022
GCR discusses shorting the market in November 2021
After a busy October 2021, GCR slowed down in November - because the altcoin market reached a state of extreme excitement, he chose to take a vacation. On November 22, he posted online that he was back and started shorting. Two days later, he clearly announced that the market was close to the high of the cycle: I am very confident that we are at the end of the cycle and the cycle still exists... If you have made money, now make sure your profits are safe. About two weeks ago, on November 10, the price of BTC had reached its highest point in the cycle at $69,000. For traders who are about to enter 2022, he gave a piece of advice:
GCRs advice to traders
Through RebirthDAO, GCR began to find ways to profit from what he considered to be an overheated altcoin market. At the time, the total value of the entire Crypto market exceeded $3 trillion. GCR looked for currencies that would have a large number of new coins issued in 2023, and asked his DAO team to collect as much information as possible about the unlocking of token issuance. Instead of choosing to short BTC or Ethereum, which have the largest market capitalization, RebirthDAO plans to short the weakest batch of altcoins in the market. GCR said he is most interested in those tokens with the largest issuance in the first half of 2022.
The research team used various means to collect this information, not only reviewing documents, but also analyzing on-chain wallets and even directly contacting project team members to understand the scale of their token issuance in 2022.
GCR later mentioned that many of the currencies that DAO considered particularly suitable for shorting were either projects in the Solana ecosystem, which were financially supported by FTX and had a large number of tokens locked to investors; or metaverse-related currencies, which were overly sought after by the market at the end of 2021.
However, GCRs most famous operation was a public bet with LUNA founder Do Kwon. On March 14, 2022, GCR proposed a $10 million bet to Do, betting that the price of Terra Luna would be lower in a year. GCR successfully persuaded Do Kwon to bet $10 million with his own Crypto, and a well-known account called @cobie was responsible for managing the custody of the bet.
GCR bets on LUNA price drop
While GCR managed to convince Do to bet $10 million directly against him, he wanted the bet to be larger, so he used derivatives on FTX to cover his balance and shorted $10 million worth of LUNA perpetual futures. Just two months later, on May 7, GCR revealed that the position had made a profit of $2.3 million.
GCR discusses his thoughts on LUNA
LUNA is very susceptible to selling pressure due to its unique nature - it is used as an asset to support algorithmic stablecoins such as UST, and the value of UST depends on the price people in the market are willing to pay for LUNA. During most of the bull market, buyers willing to buy LUNA were able to absorb all the funds that flowed out of the UST system - it even survived a decoupling event during the crypto market crash in May 2021. But by May 2022, there were more than $10 billion in UST in the LUNA system, compared to only $1 billion in 2021.
When UST was sold in large quantities on the market, people holding UST rushed to exchange it for LUNA and then sell it for real US dollars. The long queue of people waiting to exchange UST, claim and sell LUNA discouraged other traders, and no one was willing to buy LUNA on the market - which caused the price of LUNA to fall sharply.
Finally, the price of LUNA dropped to almost zero. It only cost GCR $0.72 to fully offset his risk on LUNA, effectively hedging his $20 million LUNA short position for less than a dollar.
GCR closed its short position in LUNA
As the bear market continues in 2022, GCR foresees more and more cyber attacks, scams, and frauds, which may come from criminals or from some project teams. As more and more decentralized finance (DeFi) projects are damaged by code defects, exploits, and reentry attacks, GCR warns traders to pay special attention to incentive mechanisms in the bear market and use them as an important basis for investment decisions.
GCR Comments on Scams and Fraud in the Bear Market
By the end of 2022, GCR had shorted the remaining rally of Dogecoin (DOGE) several times and advised his followers to take a break and vacation when the market situation was not optimistic. As the global price bottom of BTC came at the end of the year, GCR reminded traders that macroeconomics will never give you an advantage; it is never possible to... stick to what you understand.
On November 8, 2022, the FTX exchange collapsed due to a massive loss of customer deposits. After discovering that its sister company Alameda Research had been using the exchanges user funds, the massive outflow of funds quickly led to the exchanges bankruptcy.
GCR has repeatedly reminded traders to pay attention to the security of fund custody - during the bull market, a large number of hacker attacks, scams and wallet fund loss made him call on more traders to choose top exchanges for fund custody. Unfortunately, he did not foresee the collapse of the second largest exchange in the Crypto field.
When FTX stopped withdrawals, GCR wrote: I hope, for the sake of the industry, that the last part of my prediction will not come true. But unfortunately, in the next 3 months, it was discovered that FTX itself had about $9 billion in debt and had allowed Alameda to use customer funds to bear losses for years. What was the one item on their balance sheet? It was $7.3 million worth of TRUMPLOSE tokens. I always thought they were hedging on Betfair, GCR posted online.
5. 2023 and beyond: GCR’s predictions for the future
Following the FTX debacle, GCR permanently stopped tweeting on the @GiganticRebirth account. His alternate account, @GCRClassic, provides fewer individual trading updates and gives more general predictions for the future.
GCRs recommendations for Crypto participants
During the 2022 crypto market trough, GCRs most important advice may be a reminder about the value of time: No matter how much money you have left now, the depth and breadth of market understanding are invaluable. Even though he lost a lot of money on FTX, GCR remained optimistic about the prospects of Crypto. He said: In an increasingly digital world, digital assets are indispensable. This tweet was published on November 23, just two days after the price of BTC fell to approximately $15,476.
As the market becomes uncertain about the prospects of Crypto and some startups begin to shift their attention away from the industry, GCR puts forward the view that an echo bubble may appear in 2023, which will appear after the last optimists in the market are completely eliminated. Interestingly, the full recovery of the market in January 2023 actually laid the foundation for the cyclical bottom of BTC.
GCRs Echo Bubble Theory
In early 2023, as the market gradually recovered, GCR took the opportunity to discuss some of his long-term beliefs and predictions for the future of Crypto. In one of his earliest tweets in 2023, he pointed out that the next rally would be led by China: Many future rallies will be in coins that no one in your circle knows about. Within a few months, the first BRC 20 coin ORDI had been deployed on the BTC network. By November, ORDI would reach a market cap of $1 billion - largely due to its popularity among Asian exchanges and speculators.
GCRs belief in an Asia-driven bull cycle
Still optimistic about the future of Crypto, albeit with a dose of pessimism and skepticism. In a May 2022 tweet, he predicted that humanity would become more desperate, greedy, depraved, lonely, and trapped in the metaverse. He continued to hold this view throughout 2023, as the Crypto market slowly went through various phases, including casino coins, meme coins, and even bizarre projects involving hamster racing. In 2023, RLB, the token of Cryptos top online casino, soared to a peak of $777 million in valuation, but has since fallen by more than half.
Casino Theory of GCR
GCR predicts that the efficiency of the Crypto market will be greatly improved from the end of 2021. He believes that there are many reasons for this improvement, such as graduates from top universities joining the field, more mature regulatory structures, and strict control of privacy protection protocols and private Crypto. Although it is generally believed in the field of Crypto that transactions can remain anonymous to a certain extent, GCR reminds everyone not to mistakenly believe that any action on the blockchain is private.
GCRs views on the future development of Crypto talents
He has shown a keen interest in the 2024 US presidential election - starting in late 2021, he placed a heavy bet on Donald Trump, believing he would be the ultimate winner. The dumbest and smartest people know that Trump will win easily, he said. The former US president has continued to be in the spotlight throughout 2023 with a series of eye-catching feats, including turning himself in to Fulton County Jail in Georgia on August 23.
GCRs opinion on Trumps 2024 campaign
In the first three months of 2023, GCR invested in more than 300 tokens of the NFT project Milady, even though some people in the Crypto circle thought the project was a bit weird. About three months later, when Elon Musk posted a meme about the NFT project on Twitter, GCR sold about half of the tokens on hand. Even so, he still holds more than $890,000 worth of Milady tokens in his public wallet address ezekielx.eth.
GCR Buy Milady on BLUR
A month before GCR left Twitter, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. This caused one of the largest stablecoins in Crypto, USDC, to temporarily decouple, and its value fell to $0.88. This incident did not affect GCR - he exchanged a total of $4 million in USDT for USDC on the chain.
GCR stablecoin transactions
On Twitter, GCR expressed his view that Crypto is bound to be widely adopted in the digital age. He said: People will seek another option, a new path.
GCR Comments on the Future of Finance
His last tweet on the GCRClassic account was positive: “They’re going to keep printing more money.” He also said: “Ethereum will be $10,000 one day.”
GCR’s last tweet and his prediction for Ethereum price
A week later, he liked a tweet that said “See you when ETH hits $10k.” He hasn’t been seen since.
